BONES, BONES EVERYWHERE.

Use of the human body has been used for millennia to portray emotions, in propaganda and in art. Few things could have been more terrifying as seeing heads on sticks, or 20,000 bodies crucified down the Appian Way. In recent times, few things could say evil better than photos of dead bodies at Nazi concentration camps. The most challenging thing I have seen was at Choeung Ek (better known as the Killing Fields) that lie outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Here, the skulls of more than 5,000 people killed by the Khmer Rouge are displayed in a Buddhist stupa. Looking at the skulls, you can see many have been shattered or smashed in, so as to save money on bullets. Up to 2.5 million people died in this senseless massacre. As a symbol of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge, no better memorial could be designed. It’s eerie standing at the memorial, staring into the empty eye sockets, thinking of what these people endured in their last days, the last minutes of their lives.

Looking at these skulls in the Killing Field stupa was the most moving experience of my life.

Human bodies portrayed in such a way are horrific in nature, largely because of the way they met their end. But human bodies don’t have to be horrific. Recently, there have been several touring groups (like Body Works) who have been displaying plastinated bodies to a very interested audience (this may change with the revelation that some companies have sourced bodies from China which were those of political prisoners, in particular followers of Falun Gong). The catacombs in Paris have long been a tourist draw card. I saw the mummified body of a sunglass-wearing monk in Thailand who died in the 1970s. Weird but not horrific.

Mummified body of a monk who died in the 70s. The sunglasses are a touch undignified.

The most extreme example I have seen was in a church in Rome.  Its crypt has been dedicated  to the use of bones in art. The Capuchin Crypt is found under the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccuni (that’s a mouthful). 4,000 skeletal remains have been placed in elaborate and ornate designs in 5 small, dimly lit crypts. Frommer’s travel guide described it as “one of the most horrifying images in all of Christendom”. The Marquis de Sade visited and described it as “an example of funerary art worthy of an English mind, created by a German priest who lived in this house” (whatever that means). Bones have been arranged as crosses, as grotesque garlands, bony chandeliers dropping from the ceiling, as stars, as lampshades, as light fittings, in triangles and in circles. (Ed Gein and Jeffery Dahmer would have appreciated this take on interior design). Some skeletons have been left intact. In one crypt, a skeleton is enclosed in a niche made from bones. In its right hand, it holds a scythe like a bony Grim Reaper. He holds in his other skeletal hand a set of scales that symbolize good and evil. There’s a clock, composed of bones with only a single hour hand to symbolize the idea that time has no beginning or end. This focus on mortality and man’s temporary existence on Earth is reinforced by a plaque that reads "What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be."

Collection of postcards from the crypt, highlighting the walls of skulls and bones The bottom left shows the complete Grim Reaper skeleton.

It’s a little ironic that an ossuary display of this nature is found in a Catholic Church, given the Catholic Church’s opposition to exhibits that the likes of Body Works puts on. The Capuchins insist that the display is not macabre, but meant to act as a silent reminder of the swift passage of life on Earth. The first bones were installed in 1631, when the monks brought to the church 300 cartloads of human remains. Instead of being reburied, the decision was made to rearrange the bodies in the five small chapels of the crypt. As the Capuchins were an order dedicated to closely following St. Francis edict to help the poor, many of the poor that they supported both in life and in death were buried here as well, in the holy soil brought all the way from Jerusalem. As monks died, the remains of the longest-buried monk were exhumed to make way for the newly deceased. The turnaround from burial to ornament piece was usually around 30 years. Bones were added to the crypt until the practice stopped in the late 19^th Century. Mark Twain dedicated several pages to the chapel in his famous travelogue, The Innocents Abroad. Twain spoke to one monk at the church who seemed content with his fate, “(the probability that) someday (he will) be taken apart like an engine or a clock...and worked up into arches and pyramids and hideous frescoes, did not distress this monk in the least. I thought he even looked as if he were thinking, with complacent vanity, that his own skull would look well on top of the heap and his own ribs add a charm to the frescoes which possibly they lacked at present.”

It’s still not clear what inspired the monks to start this macabre decoration. The Capuchin order is one oddly concerned by the fragility of life, with reminding people of their mortality a notable focus of theirs. J.D. de Chatelain, who visited the crypt with a friend in the 1850s commented “what appears to me yet more disgusting is that these remains of the dead are only exposed in this manner for the sake of levying a tax on the imbecility of the living”. The gruesome crypt earns a bit of cash for the order. Entry is by donation but photography is banned so most people end up buying two or three of the postcards that are on sale. I guess we will never know what inspired those first monks to cart bones from a nearby cemetery to use as ornaments and wall fixtures.  Life may be beautiful but it is also short.